The Sixth Doctor & Ian Chesterton: Sagas!
The Story So Nice I'll Tell It Twice...
There's no time like the present to dig up the past! Or the future! This release is a little wibbly-wobbly... you know the rest!
I'm crawling out of my cave because I heard David Tennant was going to be on a Magic card, and my little 16-year-old's heart fluttered. Curiously, I'm not here to talk about his card, no! The Blast from the Past deck has a lot more open-ended designs by virtue of caring about one of my favorite themes: Historic! Historic is a fun little batch that includes legendary creatures, artifacts, and... Sagas.
I know we got Tom Bombadil last week, but I have a hipster streak and an aversion to building five-color mana bases unless it's for Dragons. (...What do you mean Lord of the Rings dropped back in June and/or will not come out until November? I thought Doctor Who was the temporally confused set.) So once I saw the full list of Doctors and Companions, the wheels turned and I found a delightful little combination...
The Commanders
The main event here, as expected, is The Sixth Doctor. He copies the first historic spell we cast each turn and makes the copies nonlegendary so that we can keep the token (no matter what). Historic being a batch means there are basically four ways to build it: a mix of all three or focused on one. I'm obviously choosing to focus on Sagas, because the thought of copying Kiora Bests the Sea God nearly made me pass out. That leaves the choice of companion.
Strictly speaking, there are six options that would be good for The Sixth Doctor, but only three key into our version of the build, as the other three (Jo Grant, Peri Brown, and Sarah Jane Smith) are more broadly historic-focused in a way that don't maximize a Saga-focused version.
I would have to play this deck for a few months before I would be comfortable regularly making decisions about when to read ahead on my Sagas with Barbara Wright. I think too many of the current Sagas want to start from the beginning for her effect to regularly matter, but a specific build could go differently. Romana II wants to be on the field at the same time as the Doctor, and that's not a guarantee. I want a back-up plan, and Ian Chesterton is our go-to. By letting us replicate our Sagas, Ian can let us pump out some additional mana in the early game to double up our lower-mana-value Sagas before we get to six mana and The Sixth Doctor.
The Sagas
The exact number of Sagas to go for here is tricky. A lot of Sagas are, well, Limited-focused, but we've had enough sets with them to have a fun selection. (Not to mention this Commander set coming with 19 total Sagas, 11 of which could fit in our deck). The full decklist is at the bottom, but here are my key role-players.
Mana-Fixing/Ramp
Bending towards Sagas means trying to get lands with them as well! The Birth of Meletis can snag us a land drop, The Weatherseed Treaty puts one directly on the field, and City of Death snags us some Treasure tokens (or spicier tokens in the late-game). This is the aspect of the deck that needs to be most supplemented by other card types, but we'll get to those later.
Card Draw
Only five Sagas draw cards, but they can really help smooth out the early game. I'm especially fond of Love Song of Night and Day, which can draw four cards when copied, and at three mana, it can be more easily replicated by Ian Chesterton, if we don't have the main commander out yet!
Removal
To no surprise, white really pulls its weight here, although the four-mana wipe is curiously found in blue! There are about eight:
Game-Changers
And here we have those Sagas found at the top of the curve, which warp the game around them just enough to be worrisome. Then you double them and things go haywire!
The Enchantress Sub-Theme
My current build of the deck has 21 Sagas. That's a lot of enchantments already! We have some Saga-specific payoffs already, like Historian's Boon and Satsuki, the Living Lore, but we want the deck to really hum without lucking into either of those two cards.
There's a whole category of enchantress-type effects, and I went with what I thought would work best here. Sythis was the best version of the effect by virtue of being legendary and therefore copiable by The Sixth Doctor. Other cards that care about enchantments, like the aforementioned Sigil of the Empty Throne or Court of Vantress just represent a solid value proposition that move the game towards a natural conclusion, one way or another.
Deck-Specific Ramp
My favorite part of building for a specific archetype is the way in which you can pull up rarely used cards for it. We have a major enchantment theme and we can lean into that! We don't need the usual tips and tricks. Sure, I'd still throw in a Sol Ring and Cultivate, but we can get creative after that.
Cloud Key reduces the cost of our 31 enchantments by 1... or 2, if copied by our commander! Overgrowth represents that interesting Aura-based ramp that can trigger our Constellation effects (and avoid searching our library, which River Song hates almost as much as I do). Peri Brown can actually help get out the Sixth Doctor on turn five and maybe let him copy a spell if we have enough creatures on board. That's value!
So, About That "Once Per Turn"...
It's unlikely that Ian Chesterton gets to replicate a Saga more than once (unless it's two mana), and The Sixth Doctor is restricted to once per turn.
Can we get around that? Yeah! By giving our spells flash with either Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage or a transformed Heliod, the Radiant Dawn, our Sagas can get copied on each opponent's turn. This can get you an additional Saga or two copied per turn cycle.
Okay, that's pretty neat, but what else can we do?
These three represent the turbo-drive that our deck can start running at. They can take our one Saga, copied by The Sixth Doctor into two, and make it happen a third time! There are very few of our Sagas that won't turn a corner when tripled. Of course, if we don't always have the extra mana or our commander in play, there are other ways to get the stories told over and over...
Of note, Yenna can only copy the uncopied Sagas (or enchantments), but that can still help us get a little extra value when we can. (She can even copy our land enchantments for extra ramp, and she's copied by our main commander!)
Now for the elephant... er, mouse in the room: Three Blind Mice. Its second chapter copies a token. Any token. So if it is a token, it can make a copy of itself to keep making mice, buffing creatures, and making more of itself. There's definitely an argument for going all in on this wacky little card, but I'll just throw it in as a fun-of. We have enough copying effects that its engine can get going every now and then but it's not guaranteed. Squeaking at your opponents for thirty minutes sounds fun... once.
So, let's wrap this up!
Final Statistics
There's no genuine formula to a deck, but I still like to have a certain number of effects when running a decklist so that I can feel comfortable with its preliminary runs!
Card Advantage: 13 total; 11 pieces of card draw, 4 pieces of recursion
Mana Advantage: 11 total; 4 mana-adding permanents, 3 land-to-field searches, 4 enchantment cost-reducers
Disruption: 6 total
With a tune-up, I'd probably end up cutting some of the more wheel-spinny pieces in favor of regular pieces of disruption; most likely something like Negate and friends to keep any big board wipes like Farewell at bay.
Conclusion
Whew, that was a lot bigger on the inside! I hope you're interested in this narrower but splashier version of a Saga commander! Comment below to let me know what you'd change or tweak!
The Sixth Doctor & Ian Chesterton: Sagas! - The Story So Nice I Told It Twice
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View this decklist on Archidekt
